“You’re off the pool today. Dress and get out of here.”
The next day Wakeland called races: 100-meter freestyle, single elimination, two kids at a time. Wakeland shuffled the frosh and JV, and after three rounds Ben and Russell were the last two swimming. Wakeland smiled at them, sizing them up before opting for a 200-meter individual medley to finish things off—50 butterfly, 50 breast, 50 back, and 50 free. Brutal.
Ben had Russell on the butterfly, at least two strokes ahead and pulling away as he came off the first wall. Ben glared at the kid as he passed him. Take that, asshole. By the time he spun for the breast, Ben had gained a length, and he burst out into the calm water in front of him, surfacing into the hollers and whistles of the boys on the side of the pool and then back down into the thrumming water. The first wall off the breast, Russell closed the gap by a length. At the first wall off the back, Russell was at Ben’s feet, and Ben’s chest suddenly constricted, his lungs closing down. His left calf cramped, a knot of muscle curling his toes with pain, and Russell torpedoed ahead of him. Shit, shit, shit. Ben barely got his shoulders out of the water, his lead legs sinking into the deep, and then Russell was at the wall and that was it. When Ben hit the wall, he climbed out of the water and puked his guts out all over the green grass.
He sat there next to his own stinking insides and watched the boys retire to the locker room, until the pool went a flat reflective blue. It was at least ten minutes before he realized he had been digging a hole in his wrist with the nails on his right hand, and by the time he got back to the locker room and out of his suit, everyone was gone.
“You’ve got what counselors would call an anger-management problem.”
Ben spun around: Coach Wakeland, his arms crossed in front of his chest.
“I’m rude, I’m ungrateful,” Ben said. “Don’t take responsibility for my actions, mean, thoughtless.”
Wakeland grabbed Ben’s wrist and turned it over. Four crescent nail marks, swelling with blood.
“No,” Wakeland said. “You’re just unhappy.”
Wakeland hunted bandages and antiseptic out of a cabinet in his office while Ben slipped into his jeans and T-shirt and sat back down on the bench, suddenly feeling the life go out of his muscles.
“You know why you lost that race?” Wakeland said as he swabbed the cuts on Ben’s wrist.
“?’Cause I suck.”
Wakeland laughed, a sad one.
“Because you don’t know how to breathe.” The coach taped the bandage to Ben’s wrist. “Stand up and take a breath.”
Ben did, a deep one.
“Keep your shoulders down; stop puffing out your chest.” Wakeland put his hands on Ben’s shoulders and shoved them down.
Breath. With the palms of his hands, Wakeland clamped Ben’s ribs in place.
“You lost that race because you only got sixty percent of the air you needed,” Wakeland said. “Your legs cramp up?”
“Double knots.”
“Your chest feel crushed?”
“Like someone jabbed fists into them.”
“That’s because they were empty and your stomach muscles were pushing against them, constricting them. You panicked and you started breathing with your chest and shoulders, and you let Russell pull away from you.”
Coach grabbed the waistband of Ben’s jeans. “You breathe with your diaphragm,” he said. “Here.” Wakeland’s fist pushed against Ben’s stomach and he explained how the diaphragm worked, the way it contracted, opening up the thoracic cavity and allowing lung expansion, the way a man who is breathing right simultaneously takes in more air and uses less. “It’s like singers,” he said. “Opera singers. You ever listen to them?”
“My mom and stepfather love that crap.”
“Next time sit down and listen with them,” he said. “Pay attention to how long they hold notes. That’s the diaphragm. Breathe,” he said. Wakeland’s fist knuckled Ben’s stomach. “Push my hand away.”
Ben tried, but the coach’s fist was stabbing into his gut.
“What are you, some kind of wimp?” he said. “Push my fist.”
Ben had to brace his feet against the floor, leaning his torso into Coach’s fist. Ben took another breath, this one bigger than the last, and a new compartment opened in his lungs; he could feel it, cool air against the inner warmth of his lungs.
“Good,” Wakeland said, letting go of his waistband. “Now you’re breathing.”
After dinner that night, Voorhees and Ben’s mother retreated to the backyard patio while Ben finished the dishes. They liked to share a glass of white wine in the setting sun while they debriefed each other about their day and listened to the classical station on the radio. This was husband-and-wife time, and Ben wasn’t invited. “There is no more important relationship than the one between husband and wife,” Voorhees liked to say. He meant that the husband and wife were the glue to the family, that without that bond everything else would fall apart—the marriage, children’s morals, western civilization—but Ben came to understand it as Voorhees’s biblical justification to get his wife alone. And he wanted her alone a lot.
Finished with the dishes, Ben locked himself in the bathroom, stripped off his shirt, and stared at himself in the mirror. He was sinewy and lean, his shoulders broadening, a few wisps of hair creeping up his belly. He liked the bulge of his muscles, the planks of his chest; it was a body, he thought, that deserved to be admired. He pressed his fist into his lower stomach and breathed, trying to push against it with his rising diaphragm. Outside, he could hear the baritone’s beefy notes rising and falling. He didn’t know what the man was singing about—it was in Italian, or Spanish or something—but the music made him feel weird, sadly happy. On the bathtub edge, Ben tried to breathe with the singer, even voicing a few off-tune notes. He felt stupid doing it, but he was in the bathroom and who the hell cared? When the man hit the final note, holding it solid against the pulsing strings, Ben held the note with him. He sounded like an idiot but he held it, his diaphragm pushing against his jeans, his shoulders flat and square, the air vibrating his vocal cords with the singer’s until the baritone cut out and Ben’s unsteady voice went on for one beat more.